Blue Marlble

I had considered this project for almost a year before starting on it, and the layers of its meaning have been growing from then on. It began with the thought about how really there are no set colours, because they are always viewed in different settings, by different people and under different light. I was thinking about (my) bad vision, how no one can see what I see, and perhaps my version of colour is different to somebody else's. As I live in a very brightly coloured house, something which I encounter every day, I had the idea to record its colour and prove that the house is not one colour, but hundreds. The process of recording then linked to my interests in time and how it can be logged through photographs; I like how the task is bizarre and obsessive, collecting information that is useless, unnecessary, mundane.

I had first thought that the project would just be a collection of photos, either to be printed on viewed on screen as a collection. As I am an enthusiastic user of Instagram, and routinely upload photos of my work, I thought that format would really lend itself to the project. The obsessive logging of memories might actually be a comment on how people use Instagram and social media,  recording their lives with the ability to subsequently look back and trace their experiences back in time. As the photos are uniformly square, it also provided a suitable format for the blue house photos. Instagram records the date when the photos are taken so I thought that if I am to present it I can arrange it in a calendar type way, according to the dates, which would call upon the role of time in its creation and meaning.

When I came to make the Instagram account I was faced with the dilemma of what to call it. I didn't want it to be gimmick, or to sound like a ridiculous experiment made for fun, but I discovered that I was fairly limited by the usernames that were available. I remembered the Blue Marble photo taken by the Apollo 17 spacecraft in 1972, which looked back at the Earth from 45 000 kilometres away. The link with the colour seemed immediately appropriate but it also gave me the idea that my project was similarly looking back at 'home'. Viewing home from the exterior, with a separation from it. This gave new meaning to the project overall as well as providing inspiration for the name. I have called it Blue Marlble, a play on the famous photo and Marlborough Road, the street o which the house is situated.

As colour is ubiquitous, I have observed how the project invites further connotations of other things that are blue. The sea + the world, dead computer screen, Klein + blue in art